‘We never intervene – unless they’re not eating’: the secrets of Race Across the World

When Alfie and Owen won Race Across the World last night I confess that I, a grown man who once reported from war zones, actually wept. The 21-year-olds started the race as the most annoying contestants. Owen seemed like a lad on tour, out for the Wagyu beef and beers in South Korea, while Alfie made Nurse Ratched look chilled and laid back, always insisting to Owen that they were on a race not a holiday.

But then Alfie talked about still getting over the loss of his mum to breast cancer when he’d just started primary school, and the following week, in Thailand’s Khao Yai National Park, trainee pilot Owen admitted to depression and broke down on camera. “You good?” Alfie checked in, and you could see how deep their bond was despite the lightness of their bantz. Suddenly, I was rooting for them.

And that’s the sneaky trick at the heart of Race Across the World, perhaps the most British of all reality/factual entertainment shows. On the surface it’s about Brits abroad, usually out of their depth, and then round about episode two, you realise you read everybody all wrong and moments of wonder appear so often they no longer seem remarkable. If Hollywood scripted it, you wouldn’t believe a word.

Launched in 2019 on BBC2 it was a near instant hit. On overnight viewing alone, the show tops Barb’s weekly charts, beating Britain’s Got Talent, The 1% Club and Coronation Street. The recently released 28-day consolidated figure for this season’s first two episodes – which includes viewing on iPlayer – gives them both an astonishing 7.1 million. For comparison, the most watched programme in the UK so far this year is Mr Bates v the Post Office which averaged 9.8 million.

The premise is simple. Five duos – married, mates, siblings or parent/child – have to get from, in this year’s case, Japan to Indonesia. They are given £1,390 each, the price of a one-way air fare, a world map, a GPS device and a travel guide with local job adverts. They give up their smartphones, bank/credit cards and access to the internet. If they run out of money, it’s race over. They can take jobs if funds are running low but they’re racing against the clock. Each episode ends with a timed check in, and the fastest pair at the end of the race wins £20,000.

It can be hair raising – a race that lasts two months and sees contestants variously trapped on fog bound ferries for days on end, caught on trains without tickets by irate inspectors or scrambling around Phnom Penh after losing money and passport. But the show’s producers know it’s possible, because they test out the routes first, sending two researchers out on the road on the same tight budget. Only one knows the full plan, leaving the other to experience the race like a contestant.

This is inspired by the pilot for series one, where one researcher’s miserable videos stuck on the Caspian Sea were so gripping producers made sure that route was included – only to have the same researcher stuck in the same location with the contestants.

The production team set some safety rules – about travelling at night and crossing borders safely, for instance – and organise visas and vaccines in advance, but leave everything else in the hands of the players. “Every bus and train option is researched,” says executive producer Stephen Day. “But we can’t predict what’s going to happen, so we have to be ready to adapt. Until someone does it for real, you don’t know what will happen.”

For the contestants, it’s this freedom to adventure that’s the appeal. “We knew we were racing but that wasn’t why we did it,” explains Stephen Redding, 62, who raced with his wife Viv, 66. “We didn’t want to dribble into old age, we both have health issues, we loved the Canadian landscape in season three and we thought we still have some adventure in us.”

Stephen and Viv’s story is a classic example of Peak Race. At first, they seem like a long-married couple. We find out he is Viv’s third husband. They bicker about the budget and worry about sleeping on the floor but stuck in a grimy bus station in the dark they start slow dancing. Not your typical reality show.

“We interrogate would-be contestants’ motivations very hard to make sure they’re not just taking part for money, or to boost their Instagram following or get some product endorsements,” explains the show’s line producer Maria Kennedy. “They are not normal TV contestants, and they wouldn’t apply for anything else.”

The auditions are tougher than most. Would-be racers come to London where their phones and wallets are taken away and they have to see how far they can get in an hour. Kennedy assures me that the entire team is hands off, which I briefly don’t believe. Some of the contestants’ decisions are so bonkers, or the mistakes they make so screamingly obvious, that you assume it’s a bit of a set up. But, says Viv, the crew don’t intervene even when they’d clearly love to – they are not even allowed to give the contestants extra food.

“Our tip would be to get jobs along the way,” she explains. “Not only for the extra budget – working puts you more in touch with local people. They invite you to stay in their homes and they feed you and you share stories. You understand what’s going on much better. By the end we were turning down money from strangers but on the way to Ho Chi Minh city we were a bit rabbit in headlights. We were booking a train that left at 2pm and arrived at its destination at 8pm. We kept asking if it was six hours and we thought they said yes. It turns out it was 30 hours. The look on the crew’s faces when they had to jump in a van and try and keep up...”

Stephen’s tip is simple. “Signs in English are for tourists, and you should obey them,” he chuckles. “In one park there was a big sign saying don’t look monkeys in the eyes. So of course, I looked a monkey in the eyes, and it attacked me.” Other than that, the pair insist, they “never felt under threat”.

Each pair has a director, a producer/camera operator who uses a small handheld camera and carries a GoPro for tricky shots, plus a local fixer and medical support – which follows them about an hour behind. There’s also a DoP and a series director following all teams to shoot the big sweeping drone shots that capture the beauty and scale of the countries they’re travelling through, but also the hustle and bustle backdrop of travelling as the contestants often move too fast for establishing shots.

The crews don’t get to sleep in luxury hotels or eat in fine restaurants, they’re slumped in coaches or hitching on the back of trucks along with the contestants. The crew get some downtime at the checkpoint where they get 48 hours to crash, to rest and recover, while the contestants staying separately at secret hotels.

“We call it coming into the matrix,” says Kennedy. “On the road on series four I received 117,000 WhatsApps and only four were from my mum. We are fully immersed.”

There’s psychologists waiting at each check point to talk to the contestants and make sure they’re not suffering. They also check in when filming is over and just before the series airs when the media pressure starts to build. “Because we will intervene if they’re in danger, and we have a real duty of care,” says Day. “If contestants – and there have been some – who are so focussed on budget that they’re not eating then you have to get them to spend money on food.”

The hardest thing to do without, says Stephen, is the phone. “It makes you realise how we use them all the time,” he says wryly. “Apart from that, my key thing was – we just needed to come back married.”

Viv laughs. “It actually made me realise that we are a formidable team and we can do anything together,” she adds. “We’re going to Canada next year. We want to retrace the steps of the third series. We’ve realised that now is the time of life for adventure.”